


here, see my castle of lies

by todreaminscarlet



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Nothing explicit, hints of darkness around the edges
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-17
Packaged: 2018-05-02 04:03:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5233343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/todreaminscarlet/pseuds/todreaminscarlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Slowly, his lips curve into a smile and his eyes begin to light with a deeply burning flame. “Susan,” he says, like he did that very first time, and her heart (the traitor) has not learned a single lesson in the past seventeen or so years of her young (old) life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here, see my castle of lies

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what this is, and I don't know what I was thinking, but please join me in this hellish trash can. 
> 
> Tom Riddle x Susan Pevensie...it makes too much sense, really.

He’s not trouble. Not like  _that_.

He’s handsome and charming, and she’s  _impressed_ , and that’s really all it is. ( _really_ ).

(Even then, she lies.)

They meet when they’re young and she’s following in the footsteps of Peter the Gryffindor (only one year into school, and he’s already made an impression, as always). She’s stiff and proper, sitting next to Peter, fingers humming with anticipation and nervousness and pressure (she will be good at this, this magic. She will be  _good_.)

He walks by their compartment, and Peter’s back straightens, and the boys stare at each other for a brief moment, and she waits;  _he_  smiles. He’s tall for his age and handsome already; his smile lightens his face and his eyes are friendly, and when he starts to speak, his voice is liquid smooth. “Pevensie,” he says and something thrums under his voice, but she forgets to wonder when he turns his eyes upon hers. “And who might this be?”

Peter is stiff and firm, and she is waiting for the introduction, and after a pause, prods him in the side. “My sister,” Peter says, “Susan.”

“Susan,” the boy repeats, his voice low. He smiles at her again, and she gives him a slow one in return. “Tom Riddle.”

(Years later she will think back to this moment and wonder if it was the start or the end of it all, even then.)

* * *

( _Smart_ , the hat muses as she sits under it,  _but ruthless. You want, don’t you? And you could be great, if you wanted to be. Slytherin could make you great._ She glances to the far wall, at the green banners hanging in the air, sees black hair gleaming blue under the lights, remembers a charming smile and  _wonders_. But she looks out at the table on the side of the room, at Peter’s golden hair highlighted under the flickering candles, and she knows what it would do to him were she to choose the house of slithering snakes. She closes her eyes, thinks,  _I can be great wherever I go_. The hat hums in return;  _but what kind of greatness_?)

(She chooses Ravenclaw.)

* * *

They aren’t friends. She sees him in the corridors sometimes, always surrounded by sycophants fawning for his attention. They never talk but he always smiles at her.

(They feel like a secret, those moments in the hall; it feels like it is only the two of them, other students be damned. It feels like a respite from the stress and panic and movement; like a halt in the flow of time instigated by the connection of their eyes. He smiles at her with a slow smile; it’s charming and dangerous and his eyes stay steady on her, and her heart won’t stop moving in her chest.)

(At first she smiles back, all young and lonely and impressed; she is eleven and lost–Lucy and Edmund and Mum are so far away–and he is  _something_  to her (not quite kind, but not at all mean) and she can’t help herself.)

* * *

They aren’t friends.

They aren’t.

* * *

A year passes, and the summer in between, and war comes. (Bloody, destructive war.) Frightening words are thrown around her and buildings are blown apart and everything is  _not as it should be_ (they should be safe with this magic of theirs, but they aren’t, because the world’s not safe. And she just wants Hogwarts and safety and the Grey Lady roaming the halls. She wants her mum and her childhood, and she just  _wants to be all right_.) 

* * *

They are sent away, tagged and herded like beasts, and her mum is waving from the platform and her eyes are hurting with tears she refuses to let fall, her fingers are tingling for the magic just out of reach, and she wants to run (run somewhere; she doesn’t care where). 

* * *

They stumble through a wardrobe in a dusty old country home, and their world is changed.

(is there anything else to say?)

(She walks into this land and calls it impossible: a world inside a wardrobe. She forgets the magic running through her veins and the passion in her soul and the blue eyes that would stare at her in halls and a castle that overflowed the magic.  _Impossible_. Nothing about her life is  _impossible_.)

She grows up there in that land made of wood—grows beautiful and gentle and fierce. She is Queen and Gentle and Beautiful, and she rules over their household with calm maturity, and it is  _home_  and it is not safe, but it is  _theirs_. This is their land that they have fought over, bled over, died over. This is their home they have made secure and protected and loved. These are their subjects they have freed and ruled and adored. This is their  _home_.

This land makes their magic sing—sing with life and joy and peace in the midst of insecurity and war and struggle. They are alive, and the land shouts praises back to them, and it is the most beautiful life she could imagine. (later, she will tell herself the same thing to make herself forget: i _t was too beautiful to be real_. But that’s a lifetime away.)

Here, she is poised and regal and damn anyone who sees anything less than Narnia’s Queen. Here, she has picked her battlefield and it is one of diplomats and charm and beauty and lies and imperfect perfection. Here, she has chosen her dominion, and damn anyone who thinks that her choice should be elsewhere. (And it is her choice, really, She can fight and she has fought. But the noise grates on her, and her fingers are tense and the blood clings to her skin and the sounds ring in her ears and the fear shadows her eyes—the battlefield is not her home. Not like it is for Peter, for Edmund, even for Lucy.)

In their world, princes view her as a prize to be won, and the knowledge (of the fight, of the desired possession) both makes her proud and makes her fear. (She is beautiful, she knows, and it is a tool and a pride and a goal.) She teaches herself to smile—not just those shy smiles of a schoolgirl to an older not-quite friend, but of a queen to a subject, of a victor to a supplicant, of a friend to a confessor. She smiles, and they fall, and she smiles more.

(And she makes mistakes—bad mistakes. She sees only the charm and the courtly grace and the cool self-possession of a man with dark eyes, and she follows him to his home, and she realizes she is a fool. Her heart had fluttered and her mind had halted, and she was too old, too experienced to be this naïve.)

(Later, she will think back and recall the hazy memories of a land with a burning sun and be furious with herself. She had learned this lesson before—a painful lesson that had led to a war and death and invasion and insecurity—and yet really she had learned  _nothing_. She still cannot (will not) look past the charm, the smiles, the cool mystery of a pair of dark eyes, and she is a fool.) 

* * *

They come back—are  _thrown_  back in the same way by which they entered, and her skin is unfamiliar and her hair is too short and the clothes too rough and the power doesn’t fit and the magic isn’t real, and it’s all just  _not right_ , and the injustice and the unfairness creeps into her far-too-young body.

They go back to school, and they try to be normal; try to fit into the roles they have prescribed for themselves: these school children robed in black, blue and red peeking through.

(But there’s the struggle. There is no impossible, and there is no normal. There is only power and magic and crowns and authority. It was hers to command, and now she is nothing, just girlish fragments of the woman she used to be, and the irritation and the grief is too much to bear.)

She tries to pretend. She really does. She wears red lipstick to Hogsmeade and listens to her siblings (to their dreams and hopes and fears).  

But there’s the problem. No matter how much she pretends, she is not just a school girl, she is a Queen, gentle and powerful, and the knowledge makes her carry her chin high and straighten her back (because she knows how to walk the halls of a castle; knows how to carry herself and wear these robes; and sometimes, when the halls are emptier, if she tries hard enough, she can pretend these black robes are blue velvet and sweep across the echoing stone floors; she can imagine the sight from the window to be waves crashing upon a golden shore.)

(She wonders later, if it was chance when they were alone in the hall, or if he was watching, always watching. She wonders how much he knew, how much he guessed.

She  _knows_  later how much he wanted to know.)

* * *

He is walking her direction; taller than ever—his shoulders strong and broad, he is a  _boy_  (just a boy), and yet she sees that the word is not enough.

The corridor is empty this time, his followers scurrying through different halls, and she barely has a second to wonder before he is before her.

He stops in front of her and looks down. His eyes are as blue as ever, dark and fathomless like the deepest pools on the Isle of Doorn. She tilts her head up and stares at him evenly (too much time has passed to be scared, to be shy.). Slowly, his lips curve into a smile and his eyes begin to light with a deeply burning flame. “Susan,” he says, like he did that very first time, and her heart (the traitor) has not learned a single lesson in the past seventeen or so years of her young (old) life.

She shifts her head to the side and looks at him. He stares back, absently charming as ever, and yet, _something_  hangs behind his eyes. “How was your summer?” he asks after a just too-long beat.

She smiles a practiced smile ( _servant to master, queen to subject, friend to friend_ , she considers in the quick second between beats). “You know,” she says. “The blitz. We stayed in an old house in the country.”

He looks down at her with curious, old,  _oh-so-charming_  eyes, hums, and asks “the whole summer?”

Her heart freezes, pounds, but the smile remains steady. “Yes,” she says. “The whole summer.”

“It must have been a good summer,” he says kindly.

She looks at him, her eyes sharper, but his smile is ever-present and his eyes are gentle, and he’s just being friendly, and he’s  _Tom Riddle_ , and everyone likes him (and he’s not a courtier or a prince, doesn’t know the games they play and the compliments they offer; he doesn’t know who she is, the power she has), and so she smiles gentler and nods.

He looks up toward the end of the hall and looks back down at her, smiles again, the lines at the side of his mouth crinkling in the corners, and he is charming and something she can’t quite put a finger on and someone with whom she could be friends now, and he bows his head in her direction and moves past her (her heart is beating and thumping, even though she’s an  _adult_ , not a girl, but she’s a women in a girl’s body, and she is playing children’s games, and Narnia is no longer her home, and Cair Paravel is no longer her castle…she thinks about the charm of his smile and the depths in his eyes, and wonders, just for a second.)

She turns and stares at his retreating back as he steps out of her sight.

(His charm is flattering and soothes her wounded pride and her aching soul, and she doesn’t question it. There’s nothing  _to_  question, regardless of what Peter thinks, and at any rate Peter can’t be trusted to be rational these days, so if she begins to spend more time studying next to him in the library and smiles at him in the hallways with a practiced charm in return and if she leaves Ravenclaw to eat dinner beside him, well, there’s really no harm to be done.)

(no harm at all)

 

**Author's Note:**

> my only defense is that really weird things seem to make total sense when you've had 3 glasses of wine. 
> 
> (also, come talk to me on tumblr @adaperturamlibri)


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